Chapter Forty-eight
Hello, Helena.
We meet at last, Helena thought.
Time smiled. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she did. She felt it pull her close with welcoming arms.
I’ve been waiting for you.
I know, she said, a little guiltily. Sorry it took so long.
Time chuckled softly. It was not long at all.
Helena thought of the line from David Bowie’s song. It’s only forever. Not long at all. She realized that to Time, it wouldn’t be.
She felt the once and final change come over her completely. With it came power. As she realized what she had to do with that power, she turned away from Time and whispered one final thing in parting. Thank you.
Time wrapped around her in warmth and let her go.
Helena moved through the moments, passed through the spaces between the seconds, and returned to where she was, standing in a field of cars with Cain’s teeth embedded in her throat. He’d loosened his hold on her slightly, lost in the sensations of what he was doing. She knew he was unaware, that his defenses were down. She moved easily into his mind and found him there, a lone man in a dark room, head bent, eyes closed.
She stood behind him in that room and softly spoke his name. “Cain.”
He raised his head and slowly turned to face her. His eyes were no longer glowing. They were just blue. Here, he was so very human. Here, he seemed so very lost.
“Why are you here, Helena?” he asked, his brow furrowing.
“I’ve come to help you,” she told him.
He stared at her, still confused. “You shouldn’t be here.” He shook his head.
“Neither should you.”
She held out her hand, palm-up. In the center rested a small glowing light. It hovered like a grain of sun, emanating brightness and warmth.
“What is it?” he asked softly.
“It’s your chance.” She looked from the light to Cain, and he did the same, meeting her gaze again. “You’ve never had a choice, Cain. Just like me.” As she spoke, she continued to feel him out in that field, pulling the blood from her body and swallowing it down. But he’d slowed his pace. He was lost in this moment, just as he was lost in life. “But Time heals all wounds,” she told him with a gentle smile. “It healed mine. Now it will heal yours too… if you want.”
Cain looked at her a long moment, glanced down at the floating light, then shook his head, his broad shoulders falling. “I don’t know what you mean.” He ran a hand through his thick blond hair. “What do you want from me, Helena? What is it going to take to end this?”
He sounded desperate at last, and he turned his back on her, not wanting her to see him in this state. He was a man at the end of his rope, at the bottom of his barrel, and he was teetering over a cliff because he knew that if this didn’t work, he would be lost forever.
Helena closed her hand, saving the light for later. Then she rushed forward, grabbed his arm, and moved around him, pulling him into a fierce, tight hug.
It was admittedly the most unexpected thing in the world for her. And apparently it was for him too, because his initial reaction was to go still in her arms, looking down at her with stiff surprise and what she could imagine were wide blue eyes.
A beat of bewilderment passed before Cain slowly wrapped his arms around her much smaller form and turned his head to rest it against hers. It felt like the most natural thing in the world just then. The two halves of Fate’s creation joined together at last, not in lust or in anger, but in compassion.
Which was just another word for love.
In the outside world, Cain stilled against her throat, no longer taking her blood. He just waited there, eyes closed, as his mind and her mind met in that sacred darkness.
“I’m so sorry Cain,” she told him as he held her and she held him back. She smiled against his chest. “Everyone always bitches that life isn’t fair, but I’m pretty sure Death has it worse.”
The most amazing thing happened then. He laughed. It was soft and honest and it was unlike any laugh she had ever heard from his lips. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
“Tell me about it,” he chuckled.
Helena slowly pulled away from the hug, and he let her go. His touch was so gentle, so in opposition to the chaos he had caused over the span of his many incarnations.
But no. Those were different now, weren’t they? They had changed. As the worlds had finished combining and he’d fully become who he now was, his past had been altered. The flu epidemic of 1918 was no longer his doing. It had been nature all along, nothing more. The earthquakes. The floods. The plagues. They were all nature.
Nature was the cruelest entity in the multiverse, not death. Nature was the insistence of life but in the brutality of entropy. It forced the living to struggle, to fight and to kill. Nothing could survive without the death of something else. It was a fundamental evil. And Helena realized then that the things people most often blamed Time for – the pain of aging, the loss of childhood, the passing away of loved ones – were not Time’s doing. They were all nature’s doing.
Time merely marked the progress of Nature’s unstoppable rampage.
Nature. With a capital N. Because it was that much of a bitch.
And now Cain had a new past, and a clean slate. She smiled wryly at the thought. He’d done wrong, yes. But it was a different wrong. And he deserved a different chance to make it right.
Once more, she lifted her hand, and the light of his new chance glowed in the center of her palm. “Take it, Cain. Take it and make your own way, not Fate’s. It won’t be easy. It can’t be.” She shrugged. “I guess because it never is.”
He smiled. And she smiled back.
“But at least this time it will be yours,” she finished.
Cain withdrew his fangs from her throat. She felt him out there, leaving her. His arms released her. He stepped back – even as he remained where he was here in the safe darkness of their joined minds.
He gazed down at the shining opportunity in her hand for a long, long time. But really it was only seconds. And it was long enough. He wasn’t stupid. He knew this was his chance just as she’d had hers.
“Thank you,” he said softly.
Helena nodded. “Good luck, Cain,” she said as she lifted her hand, and he began to reach out. She grinned. “You’re going to need it.” The life he was being offered was far from perfect. She knew it was filled with pain, with loss, with turbulence that would make for a bumpy ride. But she also knew it was filled with hope. And if he played his cards right… it might even come with a happy ending.
Cain’s eyes met hers and flashed bright, glowing blue. He smiled a broad, fanged smile, frightening but beautiful in the darkness of his new life. “I always wanted the chance to need luck,” he told her.
Then he reached out and placed his hand on top of hers. The light between them rose into his palm, infused his hand and then his wrist and arm, and eventually encompassed him entirely. He closed his eyes. This was it.
“Catch you in fifty years Cain,” she said in parting as his body began to dissolve before her eyes. Within seconds it was no more than the faintest outline of where he’d once stood. But that too disappeared, and when it did, Helena closed her eyes.
And opened them to find herself standing in a field of cars. William stood before her, smiling down at her. He was the most starkly handsome, most devastatingly beautiful thing she had ever seen.
The wind tousled his dark hair, and the moonlight reflected in the verdant sheen of his eyes. “You did good, little one.”
She blinked and touched her neck. The wound was gone. So was William’s.
Cain’s past had been changed. He’d never been in that field to attack them in the first place. Helena glanced at her car. It was whole. She looked at the tree Cain had slammed into. It was no longer uprooted, but tall and strong and very much alive.
Helena had changed Cain’s past. She’d altered it using powers Time had given her as a welcoming gift, a housewarming present, so to speak. The temporary flux of unnatural and unheard-of ability to alter history had been her crown, her throne, and her mantle. Even William had never been given that power. It was too rare. It was too precious.
Time had saved it just for her.
And now it was gone. That ability was no longer there; she could sense the massive magnificence of it all used up. But she’d used it right when she’d had it. That was what mattered.
Helena took a slow, deep breath, and half-way through she released a laugh of deep, hard-earned relief. She couldn’t help it. She felt the strength go out of her, and she found herself bending over at the waist to grasp her knees. But she was still laughing. “Not so little,” she countered through her smile.
“No,” William agreed softly. “Definitely not.”
Helena closed her eyes, enjoying the sound of his voice as it washed over her.
Who would have known? Who would have guessed that the answer to it all was as uncomplicated as Cain needing a hug? As the man who’d been cursed as Death needing nothing more than to be shown a modicum of tenderness, of empathy and compassion? It was something he had never been shown, not in the entirety of his existence. Not until her.
Not until now.
The Time King had ruled throughout all of history. But it took the Queen to finally, and fairly, rewrite it.